Application, BALTIC Bursaries

 The pandemic has been a very difficult time that required drastic changes to my art practice and life. 

Prior to 2020, my entire professional life was structured around face-to-face situations, as an artist working in installation and performance, and as an art educator specialising in work with young children with disabilities. Becoming unemployed just as the pandemic began, three years and 250 miles from my previous professional network was a challenge, as most organisations or contexts that might have previously offered me work, as either artist or hands-on workshop leader were uncertain as to their own future, or in the process of restructure themselves. 

In response, over the last year I have committed to adapting my practice to a digital environment, finding new routes to elicit the same level of audience agency and narrative collapse that I had previously explored in my interactive performance work. 

Alongside this shift, the change in the everyday and new redundancy of previous coping strategies had the result that my long standing mental health problems became significantly worse. This further restricted my ability to earn an income, which in turn, further impacted my mental health. 

With great fortune, I (along with 3 other artists with disabilities) was approached by Shape Arts to produce artworks for an exhibition in Augmented Reality (AR), with support from a professional AR developer. I produced animations and text which were then incorporated into the AR environment, as well as working alongside Shape to ensure the work’s accessibility to the widest possible audience access requirements. This was a pivotal experience for me, and is the basis of my application for the Baltic Bursary. 

The production company used the software “Unity” to produce the exhibition app. Unity is free and very well supported with tutorials and guides for self teaching. The Baltic Bursary would afford me the computer upgrades needed and a month of living expenses to allow me to focus on learning to produce my own web and app based projects in Unity, taking time away from applications for other paid work and investing in a longer term set of skills. 

I see this as important both for sustained professional development (that accounts for the still changed world, and my own inability to work in the way I had previously, due to health), and to make my art more accessible. Using Unity means I will now be able to make artworks that function on a simple smartphone rather than require a PC, and the month of focused self teaching will also enable me to better facilitate a broad range of access needs (i.e. recording audio descriptions, learning how to give the audience the ability to set their own control system etc).

I have attached supporting images that show my previous practice, a screenshot from the game I produced myself in 2020, a test image from the AR project supported by a production team, and three short video loops showing the new direction in practice I would like to explore.